Reading about the New York Times most recent reporting, or as usual misreporting on Abu Ghraib made me wonder. Does anyone else find it odd that the Times devoted font page space, for over fifty consecutive days, to a story of mainly hazing like antics by a few, now convicted miscreants, but hardly a word about Tom Fox? He was the U.S. citizen and ‘peace activist’ tortured and murdered by terrorists.

I guess they just can’t find any spin that would embarrass this country?

A couple of years back I took a journalism course at UCLA. In addition, to the basic course material we were subjected to about five guest speakers most of whom worked for the LA Times. Compared to these guys Leon Trotsky was middle of the road. Each one, from an Islamic militant to a gay rights activist, had an agenda, and each made it clear that their agenda directly impacted what and how the "news" was reported. I should make it clear that this was an intro journalism course, and had nothing specifically to do with agenda or advocacy journalism. I should also make it clear that journalistic technique and any sense of objective reporting (barely discussed), took a backseat to politically enlightening the masses.

To Al Gore's credit he actually had a republican as a guest speaker when he taught journalism at Columbia. In a subsequent interview one of his students stated that it was the first time that she had ever been exposed to the Republican political message. You would have thought Al had invited a monarchist to speak to his students. As we are all aware the country is pretty evenly divided politically, but this was the first time a student at America's premier school of journalism had been exposed to the views of approximately half of her future audience.

The fact that the mainstream media ignores kidnappings, beheadings, and hundreds of thousands of bodies in mass graves, while maintaining a grossly disproportionate focus on Abu Ghraib doesn't surprise me at all.

I'm not sure if your complaining about left learning reporters or left leaning professors, or both.

I don't see a problem with either. But I do see a problem with the manipulation of the media or education by vested interests, especially foreigners.

Worse is when Americans stake out a position on the right or left and inflexibly stay there and defend their leaders no matter how embarrassingly they behave, or how ineptly they govern, or how shamelessly they BS the public.

I've got one kid in graduate school -- went to a conservative Jesuit college; one at a top tier liberal think tank; and one college bound, who, if he has his way, will be the next Jack Bauer. I have no impulse to guide their opinions. But I would hope that they form passionate opinions on issues, based on morality and reflection, not on blind allegiance to the right, the left or anything else.

As for academia's alleged liberal bias, here's an opposing view:

NYTimes

October 18, 2005

Rare Birds in the Ivory Tower (4 Letters)

?

To the Editor:

John Tierney ("Why Righties Can't Teach," column, Oct. 15) believes that the preponderance of liberals on campus can be explained by bias, conscious and unconscious.

He paints a picture of liberal scholars disparaging conservative research, of tenure and hiring committees looking askance at right-leaning colleagues.

But if this were a significant factor, wouldn't we see a difference between the makeup of a political science department and that of a mathematics department?

Mathematical scholarship has no political coloring. Politics doesn't appear on the røRmî`f a mathematician. Politics doesn't come up in job interviews. But from where I stand, mathematics departments are as liberal as any in academia.

Any explanation of liberals on campus has to explain bleeding-heart geologists, socialist computer scientists, tax-and-spend physicists and knee-jerk mathematicians. Bias can't do that. But one idea, not mentioned by Mr. Tierney, could.

Perhaps in the marketplace of ideas some ideas are winning - and some are losing.

Perhaps a couple of definitions from a, er, Republican dictionary would help clarify this discussion:

liberal media1. The great majority of the mainstream media, whose corporations are owned and operated by wealthy Republican capitalists, that engage in a constant campaign of domestic propaganda to undermine the wealthy, Republicans, and capitalism.When the public embraces the theory of the media as a liberal conspiracy, they have been successfully trained to reject negative reporting on Republicans as liberal bias, and accept positive reporting on Republicans without question.

bias1. A predisposition held by many liberal journalists to support or denounce a certain point of view, which invariably influences their reporting. Conservative journalists are open-minded enough to avoid this problem, as is the very fair and balanced Fox News Channel. Reporting on events which appears to imply failure or wrongdoing by President Bush or the Republican Party in any circumstance is a reliable indicator of bias.

Mike,

How does either of you definitions explain or even apply to the Abu Ghraib reporting?

Are you on medication, or should you be? You're making less sense then usual, not a insignificant achievement.

I ask how your definitions of 'liberal media' or 'bias' explain the coverage of Abu Ghraib and you response with two definitions, apparently your own, for Abu Ghraib prison. "Unfortunate but necessary ... EXECUTION, " by the US? That's a bit much even for you.

Judith Miller? What's she got to do with anything?

Oh well, luckily this ain't no debating team, so no need for you to make any sense.

Ya know, some folks make sense, while others produce scents!
My wife was taking a course once while studying her early childhood care curriculum. The Professor was so adamantly liberally biased that he actually let it be known how against the Viet Nam War he was and would fail anyone who presented an opposing point of view. This course was taken in the late eighties! The local fish wrapper up this way, The Times Herald Record, is so far left that they ooze bias. Yes that's right, a biased paper that promotes itself as non biased. They seize on articles that make any gun owner look like a neo nazi and obliterate any law enforcement officer who makes a questionable call. Last week, a terrible accident on the NYS Thruway, where a three year old girl was ejected from her Mother's car as it rolled over. Not a word about the Corrections Officers who were witness to the crash and stopped to render any assistance they could. Yet, had they been involved, or worse, been a cause, they would have been crucified! Submit an article, letter to the editor for instance, that doesn't agree with their view and it'll never see publication. I've had the last three fail to make print, but always print out a copy of the submission to prove it was submitted. Their explaination is it wasn't recieved through their e mail system. Funny how when it's a middle of the road, or yes, even somewhat liberal view of things, it's always there within a week's time!
Now, here's an ignition point. Is there anyone else who thinks most "Liberals" are employed in the media, teaching (especially college level) or legal professions (mostly as attorneys)? While most "Conservatives" are blue collar working class stiffs, or big business corporate types? Okay, I'm entrenched and in full battle dress, fire away! __________________Bob Johnston
Even being good for nothing, makes you good at something!

Now that Jill Carroll has repudiated statements she made while in captivity, my guess is we’ll hear less about her then we did Tom Fox. Even if she is a co-worker in the media who was held captive for 83 days.

Full disclosure and good reporting when, over the weekend the mass media said that Jill Carroll appeared on television AFTER HER RELEASE stating she was well treated, never threatened, and that the insurgents were just Iraqis defending their country. Somehow it was OVERLOOKED that that statement was filmed while she was still held, only aired after her release.I guess that’s why people refer to ‘See B. S.’ and more B.S.

A culpable media or a buyable media? As Colonel George Orwell stated after being questioned about the following article: "I love the smell of bullspit in my morning papaer. It smells like .....victory."

Wed, Nov. 30, 2005
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U.S. military pays Iraqis for positive news stories on war

By Jonathan S. LandayKnight Ridder NewspapersWASHINGTON -- U.S. Army officers have been secretly paying Iraqi journalists to produce upbeat newspaper, radio and television reports about American military operations and the conduct of the war in Iraq. U.S. officials in Washington said the payments were made through the Baghdad Press Club, an organization they said was created more than a year ago by U.S. Army officers. They are part of an extensive American military-run information campaign -- including psychological warfare experts -- intended to build popular support for U.S.-led stabilization efforts and erode support for Sunni Muslim insurgents. Members of the Press Club are paid as much as $ 200 a month, depending on how many positive pieces they produce. Under military rules, information operations are restricted to influencing the attitudes and behavior of foreign governments and people. One form of information operations -- psychological warfare -- can use doctored or false information to deceive or damage the enemy or to bolster support for American efforts. Many military officials, however, said they were concerned that the payments to Iraqi journalists and other covert information operations in Iraq had become so extensive that they were corroding the effort to build democracy and undermining U.S. credibility in Iraq. They also worry that information in the Iraqi press that's been planted or paid for by the U.S. military could "blow back" to the American public. Eight current and former military, defense and other U.S. officials in Baghdad and Washington agreed to discuss the payments to Iraqi reporters and other American military information operations because they fear that the efforts are promoting practices that are unacceptable for a democracy. They requested anonymity to avoid retaliation. "We are teaching them (Iraqi journalists) the wrong things," one military officer said. Moreover, the defense and military officials said, the U.S. public is at risk of being influenced by the information operations because what's planted in the Iraqi media can be picked up by international news organizations and Internet bloggers. "There is no 'local' media anymore. All media is potentially international. The Web makes it all public. We need to ... eliminate the idea that psychological operations and information operations can issue any kind of information to the media ever. Period," said a senior military official in Baghdad who has knowledge of American psychological operations in Iraq. Finally, military and defense officials said, the more extensive the information operations, the more likely they'll be discovered, thereby undermining the credibility of the U.S. armed forces and the American government. "It's a culture of being loose with the truth. We'd better stop it or we are going to end up like we did in Vietnam," said a senior U.S. defense official in Washington. "The problem is if you get caught, it destroys everything, and they don't realize the collateral damage potential." Spokesmen for the American command in Iraq and for the Tampa, Fla.-based U.S. Central Command, which has overall responsibility for American military operations in the Middle East, said they had no immediate comment. Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said, "We're looking into this issue . . . to ascertain all of the facts." On Tuesday, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld hailed what he called the country's "free media," saying they were acting as "a relief valve" through which Iraqis have been engaging in democratic debate and dialogue. The Los Angeles Times reported Wednesday that the U.S. military has been paying Iraqi newspapers to print pro-American stories written by U.S. information operations troops. A Knight Ridder investigation has found that the American military's information operations have been far more extensive. In addition to the Army's secret payments to Iraqi newspaper, radio and television journalists for positive stories, U.S. psychological-warfare officers have been involved in writing news releases and drafting media strategies for top commanders, two defense officials said. On at least one occasion, psychological warfare specialists have taken a group of international journalists on a tour of Iraq's border with Syria, a route used by Islamic terrorists and arms smugglers, one of the officials said. Usually, these duties are the responsibility of military public-affairs officers. In Iraq, public affairs staff at the American-run multinational headquarters in Baghdad have been combined with information operations experts in an organization known as the Information Operations Task Force. The unit's public affairs officers are subservient to the information operations experts, military and defense officials said. The result is a "fuzzing up" of what's supposed to be a strict division between public affairs, which provides factual information about U.S. military operations, and information operations, which can use propaganda and doctored or false information to influence enemy actions, perceptions and behavior. Information operations are intended to "influence foreign adversary audiences using psychological operations capabilities," according to a Sept. 27, 2004, memo sent to top American commanders by the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, retired Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers. Myers warned that putting public affairs and information operations in the same office had "the potential to compromise the commander's credibility with the media and the public." The payments to Iraqi journalists originally were intended to nurture a fledgling domestic press corps by rewarding Iraqi journalists who put their lives and the safety of their families at risk by attending U.S. military briefings in the high security Green Zone in Baghdad, where American officials live and work. "These guys had to take extraordinary risk to cover our stories," said a U.S. military officer in the United States who's familiar with the program. The effort, however, "has gotten out of hand," said an American military official in Baghdad. "The Iraqi population doesn't realize that some of the information" they receive from their news media "is bought and paid for by the United States," said the senior defense official in Washington. A former senior defense official who served in Baghdad said the group was created for the same reason that the Bush administration initially tried "to put an American face" on every Iraqi government ministry. U.S. officials, the official said, were unprepared for the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime and were forced to construct "almost from scratch" an Iraqi government and ways to communicate with a frightened and disoriented populace. "No one in charge had thought very much about the Iraqi media, about the fact that because it was part of Saddam's regime, it would just cease to exist after the regime fell and that there wasn't anything to take its place," the former senior defense official said. "The State Department had done some work on that, but the Defense Department, which was running the show, hadn't paid attention to what State had done. So it came as something of a surprise to the troops who were there that they'd give a briefing and no Iraqis would come," he said. However, a current American official and a second former U.S. official, both of whom served in Iraq, said the attempt to jump-start independent Iraqi media -- described by the current official as "priming the pump" -- quickly mushroomed into a much more ambitious and entrenched effort to influence what was being reported in the Iraqi media. "The Iraqis learned that if they reported stuff we liked, they'd get paid, and our guys learned that if they paid the Iraqis, they'd report stuff we liked," the former senior defense official said. While the Pentagon's media campaign in Iraq harks back to CIA efforts in Italy, Greece and elsewhere after World War II to discredit communism and promote pro-Western ideas, it also reflects a widespread belief by some Bush administration officials that the news media are merely another interest group to be spun, influenced, bullied or, if necessary, bought or rented. "They don't represent the public any more than other people do," White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card once said, as quoted in The New Yorker magazine. "In our democracy, the people who represent the public stood for election. I don't believe you have a check-and-balance function."

__________________You Can Call It What You Want, I Call It Messin' With The Kid

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